The Finland Station

East-West Review: The Journal of the Great Britain-Russia Society published "The Finland Station" in its Spring/Summer 2017 Issue (Vol.16 no. 1; Issue 44)


There was a time in my life, brief but passionate, when I thought that the best time ever to have been alive would have been the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and that the best social milieu in which to have moved then would have been among the Russian revolutionaries, the intelligentsia in exile. A poster of Lenin against a blood-red background looked sternly down then from my bedroom wall and books such as E.H. Carr's The Romantic Exiles, Adam Ulam's Lenin and the Bolsheviks, John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World, Isaac Deutscher's three volumes on Trotsky (well, only bits of that one) and Lenin's own What is to be Done? fuelled my enthusiasm. High in the list of these books was Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station. Even the title had a splendidly romantic ring to it. It conjured up, too, the attractive Marxist idea that history has a purpose and destination, that we can help bring about paradise, that all those long debates among rivals and factions in libraries and bars and cafés scattered randomly across the continent really were purposeful and leading somewhere - to, in fact, the Finland Station.

So it was with the memory of those youthful enthusiasms prominently in mind, that, at Vyborg station one sunny August morning, I boarded the 0950 stopping train to St Petersburg - to, in fact, the Finland Station. The first thing that strikes one about a Russian commuter train is how long it is and then how spacious and airy the carriages are inside. Each carriage is longer than what we are used to in western Europe, the ceilings are higher and, with six seats across and a broad aisle, the train seems considerably wider too.

We leave precisely on time and travel in an absolutely straight line: Lazarevka... Verna Cherkasovo... Km 117... Lebederka... This is a derelict uncultivated land that we are passing through, a sandy boggy land between birch woods and pines and tumble-down wooden dachas. Heather blooms pink in irregular patches. Golden rod and ragwort add splashes of yellow, growing where the earth has been broken and disturbed. Piles of felled tree trunks wait in a siding by an uninhabited apartment block with glassless windows. You can tell when the train is approaching the next stop because you begin to see more dachas through the trees. People get on and off at every stop. Gradually the train fills up.

At Gavrilovo, a bigger dacha settlement, there are goods vans in the marshalling yards. The hammer and sickle flies from a factory outbuilding. Here are all the signs of industry; but nothing seems to be happening.

At Kirillovskoe, a vendor selling random junk - chains, sponges, gloves, a spray of some sort, torches, tins of fish... - walks silently through the carriage. He leaves his blue plastic box on an empty seat for a few minutes; puts his other box on a seat farther along the carriage; comes back and retrieves the first and moves on. The couple in the seats opposite, after considerable discussion between themselves, buys two pairs of gloves - at 60 roubles a pair. That's £0.60 a pair at the current exchange rate.

Zelenogorsk... Komarovo... There is a well-surfaced road - and traffic - and sound barriers alongside the tracks now. Next there's a flyover. The houses in the woods here are newer, more solid and better kept than they were a few kilometres back. Anna Akhmatova, Russia's greatest poet of the twentieth century, is buried here, not far from the tiny cabin where she spent the summers of her old age.

Repino... Solnechnoe... We cross the Sestra River, a brook babbling over stones between the reeds along its banks. Before the Second World War this was the frontier between Finland and the Soviet Union. In still earlier times, it marked the border between the Swedish provinces of Karelia and Ingria.

Ozerki... Udelnaya... An enormous market here. Stalls, several rows deep, stretch away on either side of the raised track. Many passengers alight. The station connects with the St Petersburg Metro...

Lanskaya... and then... the Finland Station.

Lenin arrived here on 3 April 1917 (NS). Not long before, Tsar Nicholas II had abdicated - on 15 March (NS) in a railway siding in Pskov. Power was vested in the hands of the Provisional Government, a "bourgeois" government in Marxist terms. Prince Lvov was its first leader. Kerensky, son of Lenin's schoolmaster, was first Minister of Justice and then, later, the government's leader. This government still wanted to fight the war.

Seeking to foment even greater turmoil in Russia than that which had been brought about by war and the February -  the "bourgeois" - Revolution, Germany arranged to transport Lenin from Zürich, where he was living on fast-dwindling funds, in a "sealed" carriage to St Petersburg. It was a brilliant and cunning plan. If Russia were out of the war - and that was Lenin's aspiration - Germany could concentrate its forces on the western front and achieve a victory there before the Americans arrived to reinforce the tired French and British Armies. It almost worked. For Lenin, the means of bringing about the proletarian revolution were unimportant; and he thought, anyway, that the German workers were equally eager to end the war that they were fighting for their capitalist masters, that they would rise up and join the international revolution.

Edmund Wilson: "...for the first time in the human exploit the key of a philosophy of history was to fit an historical lock."[i]                                   

Edmund Wilson visited the Finland Station in the 1930s:

The terminal where the trains get in from Finland is today a little shabby stucco station, rubber-gray and tarnished pink, with a long trainshed held up by slim columns that branch when they meet the roof. On one side the trains come in; on the other are the doors to the waiting-rooms, the buffet and the baggage-room. It is a building of size and design which in any more modern country of Europe would be considered appropriate to a provincial town rather than to the splendors of the capital; but with its benches rubbed dull with waiting, its ticketed cakes and rolls in glass cases, it is the typical small station of Europe, the same with that sameness of all the useful institutions that have spread everywhere with middle-class enterprise. Today the peasant women with bundles and baskets and big handkerchiefs around their heads sit quietly on the benches.

The station Wilson saw was demolished in the 1950s and its replacement opened in 1960.

Today the train from Vyborg arrives at one of five roofless platforms nestled between low walls topped with rolls of barbed wire. There is no other train in the station. It empties quickly as passengers leave by one of two doors at either side of the big façade.

In a dusty glass box against a wall, ignored by all the other arriving passengers, is locomotive 293, the little engine that is said to have pulled Lenin into the Finland Station in April 1917. In October, following his August flight back to Finland to avoid arrest, the same engine (and the same driver) brought him back again. Compared to the train on which I have just arrived, the train in the box looks remarkably small and toy-like.[ii]

The 1960 façade of the Finland Station faces a broad open square. Many locations in Russia have lost their Soviet names (as has St Petersburg itself), but Lenin still presides here. This is still Lenin Square. It remains dominated by an outsize statue of Lenin himself in its centre - one of only a few statues still standing in the city that once bore his name - and the weight of hundreds of statues.

Beyond the statue, at the far end of the square, the River Neva flows. On first view is you are struck by how broad the river is. No other European city sits astride a river so wide. This is no Tiber or Seine or Thames. Sometimes when the fresh wind blows, or when the mists rise and swirl about you, you might think you are standing by the sea.
Across the Neva from Lenin's Statue, set back from the Robespierre Embankment (not even Paris has a street named for Robespierre!), there is another outsize statue. This one is much more recent than Lenin's. This is Anna Akhmatova.  Her monument was erected in 2006 to mark the fortieth anniversary of her death and stands symbolically across the river from the Kresty Prison.
[...] if ever in this country
They decide to erect a monument to me,
I consent to that honor
Under these conditions - that it stand
Neither by the sea, where I was born:
My last tie with the sea is broken,
Nor in the tsar's garden near the cherished pine stump,
Where an inconsolable shade looks for me,
But here, where I stood for three hundred hours,
And where they never unbolted the doors for me.
(from Requiem as translated by Judith Hemschemeyer)[iii]

During the February Revolution, while Lenin was still pacing the floors in Zürich, the Bolsheviks, led by Mikhail Kalinin, stormed the Kresty Prison in conscious emulation of the storming of the Bastille in Paris during the French Revolution. They marched from the Finland Station to the prison. It's not a long trek. They freed the prisoners and destroyed the prison records. But after Russia became the Soviet Union, and Mikhail Kalinin became its titular Head of State, the Bolsheviks found they had a use again for the Kresty Prison.
In the years before the Revolution, Anna Akhmatova had been a well-known young poet, famed for her beauty and widely rumoured to be a persuasive seductress. In Paris, she had been painted by Modigliani, probably as many as sixteen times, often in the nude. She met him on her honeymoon in 1910 and saw him again when she returned, alone, to Paris the next year.
Anna Akhmatova and her long, slim body - she was six foot tall - were a formative inspiration to Modigliani's developing art. His drawings and her poetry suggest a relationship that went beyond reciting Verlaine together in the Jardin du Luxembourg, sitting together beneath Modigliani's huge black umbrella in the warm summer rain.

From Poem Without a Hero
In the blackish mist of Paris
Surely it is Modigliani
Imperceptibly trailing after me once more.
He has the unfortunate quality
Of bringing confusion into my dreams
And of being guilty of disasters.

When the Bolsheviks took over, much of the pre-Revolution Russian intelligentsia fled the country, but Anna Akhmatova stayed. Nikolay Gumilyov, Akhmatova's first husband, the one who took her to Paris in 1910, stayed too - and was executed in 1921. Stalin banned her poetry and silenced her voice in the public square. In the time of the Yezhov Terror, when many of the surviving intellectuals were killed, her son, Lev Gumilyov, was imprisoned in the Kretsky Prison. His crime? Being the son of his mother. There, outside the prison walls, Akhmatova waited day after day for the "hard door" to open.
From Requiem:
No, not under the vault of alien skies,
And not under the shelter of alien wings -
I was with my people then,
There, where my people, unfortunately, were.
1961

INSTEAD OF A PREFACE
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror, I spent seventeen months in the prison lines of Leningrad, Once, someone "recognized" me. Then a woman with bluish lips standing behind me, who, of course, had never heard me called by name before, woke up from the stupor to which everyone had succumbed and whispered in my ear (everyone spoke in whispers there): "Can you describe this?" And I answered: "Yes, I can." Then something that looked like a smile passed over what had one been her face.
April 1, 1957
Leningrad

DEDICATION
Mountains bow down to this grief,
Mighty rivers cease to flow,
But the prison gates hold firm.
And behind them are the "prisoners' burrows"
And mortal woe.
For someone a fresh breeze blows,
For someone the sunset luxuriates -
We wouldn't know, we are those who everywhere
Hear only the rasp of the hateful key
And the soldiers' heavy tread.
We rose early as if for an early service,
Trudged through the savaged capital
And met there, more lifeless than the dead;
The sun is lower and the Neva mistier,
But hope keeps singing from afar.

A few hundred metres to the southeast of Akhmatova's statue, and facing the Fontanka River, is the Sheremetev Palace, sometimes known still as the Fountains House for the fountains that once played in its front courtyard. Abandoned by its aristocratic owners in 1917, the palace was converted into flats under the Communists. Anna Akhmatova lived in one of them, in a garden wing. The rooms she inhabited are now a museum, accessed from round the back of the palace, off the Liteyny Prospekt. Her rooms are kept as they were during the time of Stalin's Great Terror.
You cross the dense shade of the tree-filled palace garden. Here a few sit on benches quietly reading. There is not a mobile phone or a laptop in sight. You climb the stone stairs and knock on the door. You are ushered into a small entrance hall. There is a hat on the hat stand and a suitcase packed ready to go.
Ahead of you is an enfilade of drably painted low-lit rooms, furnished as in the 1930s. But first you are asked to go to the rear of the narrow entrance hall, to the corridor where the kitchen is and the bathroom with its little window looking out into the stairwell. That was useful when there was an unexpected knock on the door. In Akhmatova's day the kitchen and bathroom were communal facilities; each of the front rooms occupied by different people, strangers possibly, informers perhaps.
On Akhmatova's walls there are fading photographs. Nikolay Punin, her third husband - whose rooms these were - was a photographer, and suspect for it. One of Modigliani's drawings of the youthful willowy Akhmatova is there too. It had become a treasured possession, a bittersweet reminder of a youthful love and a carefree era. She had had other Modigliani drawings, but only this one survived the 1941-44 Leningrad Blockade.
During the Blockade - where more Russians died than the total number of World War II dead from the United States and the United Kingdom combined - Akhmatova was evacuated to Tashkent. When the terrible 900-day siege was lifted she returned to these same rooms. And it was here in one of these rooms that in November 1945 she received a "Visitor from the Future".
Isaiah Berlin was born in 1909, in Riga (then part of the Russian Empire), into a family of Jewish timber merchants. He lived in Russia - in Riga and in St Petersburg - until his family went into exile in Britain after the Bolshevik Revolution. In 1932, he was elected a fellow of All Souls' College, Oxford - the first Jew ever to have been admitted to what, in the words of his biographer, Michael Ignatieff, "was then the most select club in English life". His first major work, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment was published in 1939.
Berlin spent much of the Second World War working for the British Government in New York and Washington D.C. In September 1945 he was posted to Moscow. It was his first return to Russia since he had left in 1921. He still spoke Russian fluently, without any foreign accent. In November he took the night train from Moscow to Leningrad to look, ever the academic, for pre-revolutionary books. He had heard that such books were more numerous and cheaper in Leningrad than in Moscow. In Leningrad, during the Blockade, entire libraries had been sold to buy food or burnt for their immediate heat value. Owners of other books had been among the many who had died of starvation and disease.
In the Writer's Bookshop on Nevsky Prospekt Berlin met Vladimir Orlov, a historian, and asked in passing whether Anna Akhmatova - a poet whose work he had never read - was still alive. So hermetically sealed was the Soviet Union then that even Berlin's Oxford friend, and translator of Akhmatova's verse, Maurice Bowra, did not know whether the fabled poet from the remote Tsarist past was still alive.
That very afternoon Isaiah Berlin was taken to meet her. Michael Ignatieff:
Berlin and Orlov went up a dark, steep staircase to a third-floor apartment - No. 44 - past five or six rooms ranged along a corridor. Most of the apartment was occupied by Akhmatova's ex-husband, Nikolai Punin, his wife and child. Akhmatova herself had a room overlooking the courtyard at the end of the hall. It was bare and denuded: no carpets on the floor or curtains at the windows, just a small table, three chairs, a wooden chest, a sofa, and near the bed a drawing of Akhmatova - head bent, reclining on a couch - rapidly sketched by her friend Amadeo Modigliani during her visit to Paris in 1911. It was the only icon of a Europe she had last seen thirty-four years before. Now... she rose to greet her first visitor from that lost continent.[iv]
Isaiah Berlin:
A stately, grey-haired lady, a white shawl draped round her shoulders, slowly rose to greet us. Anna Andreevna Akhmatova was immensely dignified, with unhurried gestures, a noble head, beautiful, somewhat severe features and an expression of immense sadness, I bowed - it seemed appropriate for she looked and moved like a tragic queen...[v]
The meeting that followed has become a thing of legend. It went on through the night and into the next morning. The Hungarian poet, Győrgy Dalos, a student in Moscow in the early 1960s, has written an entire book on it, The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin. The dust jacket of that book describes the meeting as the "most extraordinary encounter in the history of twentieth-century literature".
But first there was an interruption. Randolph Churchill, son of Sir Winston, heard that Isaiah Berlin was in Leningrad and found his way to the Fountains House, hoping Isaiah Berlin would act as an interpreter for him. In the courtyard, he shouted, "Isaiah! Isaiah!"
Isaiah Berlin:
I went to the window and looked out, and saw a man whom I recognised as Randolph Churchill, He was standing in the middle of the great court, looking like a tipsy undergraduate, and screaming my name. I stood rooted to the floor for some seconds. Then I collected myself, muttered and apology and ran down the stairs: my only thought was to prevent him coming to the room. My companion, the critic, ran after me anxiously. When we emerged into the court, Churchill came towards me and welcomed me effusively: "Mr X," I said mechanically, "I do not suppose that you have met Mr Randolph Churchill?" The critic froze, his expression changed from bewilderment to horror, and he left as rapidly as he could.
Győrgy Dalos:
This was a highly conspicuous scene for the conditions of the time, full of potential problems and dangers for any Soviet citizen involved. Berlin therefore decided to take temporary leave of Akhmatova, and later phoned to reschedule his visit for nine o'clock that evening.[vi]
Only after midnight were Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova left alone. Only then did conversation really begin. She asked about those of her friends from before the Revolution who had gone into exile. Miraculously, it must have seemed, Berlin was able to give her news. They began to tell one another about themselves, intimate things.
Isaiah Berlin:
She spoke of her visits to Paris before the First World War, of her friendship with Amadeo Modigliani, whose drawing of her hung over the fireplace - one of the many (the rest had perished during the siege); of her childhood on the Black Sea coast, a pagan, unbaptised land, she called it, where one felt close to an ancient, half-Greek, half-Barbarian, deeply un-Russian culture...
Tears came to Akhmatova's eyes when she spoke of Nikolai Gumilyov's arrest and execution and again at the mere mention of the name of Osip Mandelstam, the kindred poet who had perished in the Yeshovshchina. She recited lines from her own poetry. The talked of literature, of their likes and dislikes, of Herzen and Turgenev, of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, of Pushkin and Chekhov, of Kafka and Byron. It was, as Michael Ignatieff writes, "a moment of the purest communication, such as occurs only once or twice in any lifetime."
It was daylight when Isaiah Berlin left the Fountains House, eleven o'clock when he got back to his hotel. There he threw himself down on his bed saying, "I am in love, I am in love." The following February, he wrote of his visit to Anna Akhmatova as "the most thrilling thing that has ever happened to me."
Isaiah Berlin went on to a brilliant academic career, exploring the history of ideas, defending liberty. He was knighted in 1957, awarded the Order of Merit in 1971. He became the founder and first President of a new Oxford college. But, as Michael Ignatieff writes:
He never doubted that his visit to Akhmatova was the most important event in his life. He came away from Russia with a loathing for Soviet tyranny, which was to inform nearly everything he wrote in defence of Western liberalism and political liberty thereafter. His fierce polemic against historical determinism was animated by what he had learned from her, namely that history could be made to bow before the sheer stubbornness of a human conscience.
But his visit to Russia left him with a burden of guilt. Everyone but him paid a price for his visit.
Anna Akhmatova's darkest years were to follow as Soviet oppression once again closed around her. Not long before Berlin's visit, she had been given a rapturous standing ovation when she gave a public recital of her poetry in Moscow. Soon after the visit from the "English spy", her flat was conspicuously bugged. Walking with Osip Mandelstam's widow, one of her closest friends, she was followed and photographed by secret servicemen. Erstwhile friends crossed the street to avoid being seen to meet her. On 14 August 1946, in "the quiet season of cucumber salads" (Dalos), Andrei Zhdanov, Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and Stalin's spokesman on culture, gave a speech at the Smolny Institute in Leningrad in which he revived, in rather cruder terms, the criticisms of the early 1920s
I come now to the question of Anna Akmatova's literary work... Anna Akhmatova is one of the representatives of a literary quagmire devoid of ideas... Anna Akhmatova's subject matter is thoroughly individualistic. The range of her poetry is pitifully limited. This is the poetry of a feral lady from the salons, moving between boudoir and prayer stool. It is based on erotic motifs of mourning, melancholy, death, mysticism and isolation. The feeling of isolation, an understandable feeling for the social consciousness of a group that is dying out, the gloomy, hopeless notes of the dying, mystic experiences intermingled with eroticism - this is the spiritual world of Akhmatova, a fragment from the ruins of the irretrievable world of the old aristocratic culture, the good old days of Catherine, now vanished for ever. She is half nun and half whore, or rather both whore and nun, fornication and prayer being intermingled in her world... Akhmatova's poetry is totally foreign to the people.[vii]
The licence for the publication of two volumes of Akhmatova's poems was withdrawn. No books of her poetry would be published in the Soviet Union for another twelve years. Meanwhile, Zhdanov's speech was released as a pamphlet with a print run of over a million and set as prescribed reading in university literature syllabuses across the country. Akhmatova was charged with being a deserter during the siege of Leningrad, whereas in fact she had been evacuated as a national literary treasure on the orders of the Central Committee and lauded for her wartime broadcasts. Her food ration cards were stopped. She became seriously ill. Lev Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova's son, was arrested again and sent to Siberia. Nikolay Punin, arrested shortly before Lev Gumilyov, died in the Gulag. No foreigner again dared to visit the Fountains House. For forty-three years Zhdanov's word "whore" was repeated and associated in the Russian public's mind with the poet whose most important works they could not read for themselves.

Isaiah Berlin's visit to Leningrad was significant to Akhmatova's poetry as well as, particularly in her own mind, to the subsequent events of her life. Though never mentioned by name in her poetry, Isaiah Berlin appears frequently. He became "The Guest from the Future" in her long poem Poem without a Hero and the subject of a poem written soon after the visit, Cinque.
1
As if on the rim of a cloud,
I remember your words,
And because of my words to you,
Night became brighter than day....

Isaiah Berlin:
I saw her again when I was leaving the Soviet Union to go home by way of Leningrad and Helsinki. I went to say goodbye to her on the afternoon of 5 January 1946, and she gave me one of her collections of verse, with a new poem inscribed on the flyleaf - the poem that was later to form the second in the cycle entitled Cinque. I realised that this poem, in this, its first version, had been directly inspired by our earlier meeting. There are other references and allusions to our meetings, in Cinque and elsewhere.

Michael Ignatieff:
No Russian who reads who reads Cinque, the poems she devoted to their evening together, has ever been able to believe that they did not sleep together. In fact, they hardly touched. He remained on one side of the room, she on the other.
*
How, in the 1960s and 1970s, did we reconcile admiration of Marx and Lenin with the realities of the Soviet Union under Stalin and, indeed, to what continued to go on there for thirty-five years after Stalin died? True, the Soviet archives had not yet been opened and we did not yet have books such as Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands (2010) and Orlando Figes' Revolutionary Russia, 1891 -1991 (2014). But we already knew enough. We knew of the horrors of the forced collectivisation of the countryside, of the state-induced Ukrainian famine and of the Yeshovshchina - the Great Terror, the Great Purge. We had heard rumours of Katyn. We read the words of writers - André Gide and Malcolm Muggeridge come to mind - who had gone east full of hope and expectation and returned disillusioned. We knew of the treatment of the Cossacks sent back to the Soviet Union after the War. We knew that, under Khrushchev, even after his so-called Secret Speech, a milder form of socialism was brutally crushed in Hungary and the persecution of Russian Christians reached its greatest intensity. We watched the tanks roll into Czechoslovakia to crush the human face of the Prague Spring. We read Solzhenitsyn on the Gulag and saw him exiled from his native land.
A good idea badly executed? It was all Stalin's fault? It would never have happened had Lenin lived? There is surely some truth in this. But only some. It has long since ceased to be an adequate or fully credible explanation. The instruments of totalitarianism were manufactured in Lenin's time, even before the Revolution. The seeds of the Terror were sown long before Stalin. Lev Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova's son, was imprisoned under Stalin for two long periods. But his father, the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, Akhmatova's first husband, was executed under Lenin.
With Isaiah Berlin, we trace now an intellectual pedigree for Russian Communism through a very non-Marxist history of ideas - from the Enlightenment's dream of godless utopias achieved through reason alone, through the romantics, through the ideas of historical materialism, through an ideological dictatorship that knew what people wanted better than they knew it themselves, to dark night of twentieth-century totalitarianism.
Not long ago, realising that I could no longer find my original copy of Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station, I acquired another copy. This new edition carries Wilson's 1971 introduction, written shortly before he died in 1972. My previous copy of the book had been published before he wrote these last reflections. In the new introduction Wilson writes:
The remoteness of Russia from the West evidently made it easier for American socialists and liberals to imagine that the Russian Revolution was to get rid of an oppressive past, to scrap a commercial civilization and to found, as Trotsky prophesied, the first really human society. We were very naïve about this.
He also quotes Pyotr Struve[viii] at length on Lenin's character. Struve in his early years was a Marxist and associate of Lenin.
Truly, in his attitude to his fellow men Lenin breathed coldness, contempt and cruelty. To me it was clear even then that in those unpleasant, even repulsive, qualities of Lenin, lay also the pledge of his power as a politician: he always had in view nothing but his objective towards which he marched, firm and unflinching. Or rather, there always was, before his mental eyes, not one objective, more or less distant, but a whole system, a whole chain of them. The first link in that chain was power in the narrow circle of his political friends. Lenin's brusqueness and cruelty - this became clear to me almost from the outset, from our first meeting - was psychologically bound up, both instinctively and deliberately, with his indomitable love of power.
*
During my undergraduate years at Oxford, Isaiah Berlin helped me loosen the blu-tack that held my red poster of Lenin in his place of honour on my bedroom wall. Today a black-and-white picture of Anna Andreevna Akhmatova hangs in my study.




[i] To the Finland Station: A study in the writing and acting of history; Edmund Wilson, 1940
[ii] In Lenin on the Train (London; Allen Lane, 2016, reviewed in the NewYear 2017 issue of East-West Review),  Catherine Merridale challenges the Engine 293 myth, allowing only that the engine pulled a train on which Lenin travelled in August 1917 when he returned to Finland, in part on foot, for a renewed exile that lasted until October.
[iii] All Akhmatova quotations in this article are taken from The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, Expanded edition, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer, edited and introduced by Roberta Reeder (Boston: Zephyr Press & Edinburgh: Canongate Books Ltd., 1997).
[iv] From Isaiah Berlin: A Life by Michael Ignatieff (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998).
[v] Berlin's "Anna Akhmatova: A Memoir" is included in The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova, op.cit
[vi] The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin by György Dalos (tr. Antony Wood), Revised and Expanded Edition (London: John Murray, 1998)
[vii] Translation as in György Dalos The Guest from the Future: Anna Akhmatova and Isaiah Berlin. ibid.
[viii] Pyotr Berngardovich Struve (1870-1944), political economist, philosopher and editor, joined the White movement following the Bolshevik coup and from 1920 lived in Paris as an exile.

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